In a word: China.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Herbert J. Carlisle, deputy chief of staff for operations, said China’s rollout earlier this year of a new J-20 stealth fighter, which has made two or three test flights, is very troubling, along with another joint Russian-Indian stealth jet.
Both aircraft could be sold to Iran and affect a future U.S. intervention there against Tehran’s nuclear program.
“Those are discouraging in that they rolled out in a time that we thought there was maybe a little bit more time, although we weren’t sure of that,” Gen. Carlisle said.
The three-star general’s comments echoed earlier comments by Navy Vice Adm. David J. Dorsett, a senior intelligence official, who said of the J-20 in January that “we have been pretty consistent in underestimating the delivery of Chinese technology and weapons systems.”
U.S. military fighters will remain a pace ahead technologically of both the Chinese and Russian stealth jets. But if there are further F-35 delays, “then that pacing is in jeopardy,” Gen. Carlisle said.
For a generation, or really since the Korean War, the US has been able to count on a vast technological superiority gap to make up for the one advantage China could bring to bear: Sheer numbers. The technological gap is shrinking, and a time when the US economic advantage is also disappearing and when China has become bolder in supporting rogue states.
What is really scary is that China has, over the past 10 years or so, declared that it wants and intends to hold the “high ground” of space. They intend to go to the Moon, and when they get there you can bet that it won’t be for a “flags and footprints” mission ala Apollo. We have a lot to worry about.
Why are they supporting rogue states, anyway? Just to make money? To develop their own sphere of influence? Do they realize that dealing with Islamist states like Iran will backfire on them one day?
i dont think it will backfire until the united states gets a proper president and a steady withdrawl from collectivist economic policies that weaken our ability to defend ourselves
in fact, im surprised it took china so long to “show their face” in pakistan
if anything, these rogue states are buffer zones on china’s western border
In the case of Pakistan, the government in Islamabad is essentially a failed state. Huge swathes of the country are no-go areas for the military and in many more the army ends up being corrupted by local warlords (see Abbotabad). The country is economically depressed and has been for decades. The government is completely dependent on foreign aid for a huge chunk of revenue and, with the USA threatening to pull back, China is a welcome knight in shining armor.
This has got to be making India nervous. Pakistan has been a hotbed of trouble for them since 1947. The Chicoms starting to play puppeteer in the Northwestern states (and using indigenous irregular factions as cross-border proxies) will not make things smoother.
What really keeps pentagon generals up at night is figuring out new and creative ways to ingratiate themselves with the Obama administration. Mitigating the culture clash with the alien in the white house, budget cuts that threaten pet programs, and ambition to reach the next level, are the operational imperatives for our flag officers.
China is definitely a threat, but often overstated to drive funding. The best way to maintain our superiority over any competitor is in sustaining a dynamic, free market economy. That makes Obama and his sourpuss gang of socialists the real threat.
Americans should use the 2012 elections to correct our Obama mistake, and elect a true conservative to the White House.
The principle problem is that the U.S. no longer protects itself from industrial and military R&D espionage…especially from the Chinese. Our national labs managed by some the nations most radical ideological universities have become a sieve with extremely poor security controls. Then of course, we allow our adversaries and potential adversaries to come and study at our most prestigious engineering and technology universities and industries. NATO forces is another secuity sieve!
What really keeps generals and admirals at the Pentagon up at night isn’t China, and it’s not ingratiating themselves with the Obama administration either. It’s maintaining their relevance in a world that in many ways, in their minds, is passing them by.
I know, this sounds like lefty claptrap about how we don’t need a military. We do, though, just not the one the Pentagon wants us to have. We do most of our operations overseas, in countries with horrible terrain and transportation infrastructure, and as an example, until the beginning of the Bush administration (about 10 years ago) the army was confidently going forward with a self-propelled artillery piece that weighed approximately 45 tons. That doesn’t sound too bad, until you hear that in order for it to operate properly it had to have a trailer with it that weighed about the same. The system was designed for combat in Western Europe against the Cold War era Soviets; in a 3rd world country it would have been awesome, provided you could get it there, right up until it had to cross a stream or river. Virtually no bridges in the 3rd world would hold it. But the army wanted it (a new toy!) and various constituents wanted to build it, so it was a big controversy when Rumsfeld cancelled it.
Now we have a similar situation. We’re fighting two wars in far-off places, and the missions that the air force is conducting involve 2 things: air transport and ground support. So what new plane does the Air Force want? A *fighter* of course. These guys grew up reading about the fighter jocks of WW2 and then watching Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Nobody ever made a hero out of an Air Force transport pilot, certainly not because of his job anyway. And the drone guys, who do much of the air support in Afghanistan and Iraq? They’re geeks who sit in front of a screen, they aren’t even there doing the actual fighting. No scarf wrapped around their neck casually, no helmet dangling from one hand as they casually saunter away from their fighter at the end of a mission, no name (complete with tough guy nickname) stencilled under their cockpit. They’re “technicians” and the Air Force generals despise them.
Then along comes the J-20. I expect the day that thing first flew, and someone saw it on Youtube, there was a toga party at the Pentagon in Air Force country that lasted for a week. Now our “near peer” semi-enemy has a plane that we can perhaps justifiably say we need to outdo. This is wonderful! We get to buy the F-35, and no one can point out that al Qaeda doesn’t have an Air Force, because China does! The F-35, by the way, is built almost everywhere in the country. The component manufacturers are deliberately distrubuted as widely around the country as was possible, so that cancelling it would hurt almost ever Senator’s district, a little bit. It costs more this way, but of course with the Pentagon cost-cutting has never been a big issue anyway.
So we build F-35s, and years from now when they discover that the J-20 was a hoax, everyone will look silly…but they’ll either be retired or dead by then. Or maybe it’ll turn out that it’s not a hoax, but the Chinese aren’t the threat everyone thinks they are. After all, they have a big army and a big Air Force, but they can’t swim to America, can they? They can’t cross the jungles and mountains to the south, deserts to the east and north. Their military is basically defensive in configuration: they can’t project much military might into South America or Africa, for instance. They just bought their first aircraft carrier of of Uncle Ivan’s used military junk lot; it’s old and has a ski-jump flight deck, so it can’t handle high-performance fighters. We’ve got what, 10, a dozen carriers, each carrying more planes than this one Chinese ship? But no doubt the Navy’s very concerned…they need more carriers.